HBO debuts Obama-campaign documentary 'By the People'

Filmmakers Amy Rice and Alicia Sams attached themselves to Barack Obama’s campaign for President months before it was officially a campaign for President, and some of their new documentary film’s finest moments detail the retail politics leading up to the moment when the long-shot next-to-nobody becomes a contender.

HBOMichelle and Barack Obama on the campaign trail. The literally corny moments pressing the flesh in Iowa.

The low-level campaign workers – sweet and committed and idealistic – who can’t contain their exhaustion-fueled emotions when their guy’s early success seems to make ultimate victory a possibility.

The literally unguarded early moments of solitude that Obama and his family experienced – probably for the last time in their lives – leading up to that Iowa experience that made the campaign kids cry.

Despite the gradual but inevitable disappearance of the candidate inside his campaign superstructure, it’s a fine documentary -- close in revelatory quality to “The War Room,” the film about Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign that made stars of George Stephanopolous and James Carville; less quirky but just as charming as Alexandra Pelosi’s hand-held “Journeys with George,” which tailed George W. Bush on the 2000 campaign trail.

Think and say and blog what you will about Obama and his job performance so far, but his campaign made history.

And history is lucky that Rice and Sams were inside and up close, for awhile at least.

The filmmakers got their initial access through actor Edward Norton (“Fight Club,” “The Illusionist”), who served as the film’s producer.

“My recollection of it is that what we kind of suggested was just that he represented a generational shift in national politics and that we thought there was value in documenting his experiences as he entered the political fray,” said Norton, during summer’s Television Critics Association TV Tour in Hollywood. “There was no conversation or suggestion (of), ‘We’d like to follow your run for the Presidency.’ We really kind of initially just proposed a regular kind of check-in -- a political diary, if you want to call it.

“At the time, he wasn’t a candidate. (His staff wasn’t) trying to insulate him. They were, in some sense, trying to elevate his profile. And I think that they were much more open to receiving that kind of interest. And in that sense we were lucky to start forming the relationship with them before it became a much more guarded affair.”

The film arrives exactly a year after Grant Park, and at time when nobody doesn’t have an opinion about Obama and/or his agenda.

This documentary’s value is divorced from the present, said Norton (an Obama campaign donor) – a snapshot in time, but of another time.

“When you make a film like this, you’ve got to detach yourself from the ebbs and flows of the day-to-day swings in politics,” he said. “This kind of film, you really have no idea where it’s going, but at a certain point I think it became clear to all of us that it was becoming a document of how this movement operated and what … it felt like from the inside of that campaign.

“We didn’t set out to make a campaign film, but I think at a certain point it became clear to us that it was a document of how this momentous piece of history was achieved from a certain perspective.

“My feeling about that is that, whatever President Obama goes through, whatever the struggles and the ebbs and flows of success or failure in his presidency, I don’t think anything will ever diminish the significance of the achievement of his election.

“And I think sometimes you have to take the broad lens with a piece of work like this and say that maybe it’s a noble and fine ambition for it to be just a good document of how a certain moment transpired so that people can look back on it and say to their children — whatever the ultimate review of his presidency – (that) this moment was a singular moment in American history.”